The larger manufacturer of Swiss Army knives, Victorinox,
has taken over
its much smaller competitor and only rival, Wenger.

"The two official makers of Swiss Army knives, which will keep their
identities separate under the deal, have been struggling to make
headway since the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. After 9-11, the companies lost between 15% and 20% of turnover as business at duty-free outlets slumped. Although airline passengers can buy the knives in duty free stores,
they are not allowed to take them on aircraft as hand luggage because
of security concerns."

"The problem with AJAX is that it doesn't address the fundamental difficulty in developing web applications--the unbridgable client-server divide. You still have to use a completely different set of languages and tools for writing the GUI on one hand, and the server components on the other, with no possibility of sharing code in between."

"A truly revolutionary web paradigm would allow developers to use the SAME language and object model in developing both the client- and the server-side. The server would retrieve an objects from the datastore, serialize it, and pass it off to the client for editing. The client would be able to modify these same objects (defined in the same class libraries) and pass it back to the server, which re-validates them and persists them back into the datastore."

The Swiss government has been seeking for years to convince the Japanese of the benefits of a bilateral trade accord. Japan is Switzerland's third-largest trade partner after the United States and the European Union. There seems to be
new momentum
behind achieving free trade agreements
with the USA
and
now with Japan.

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